Let's Leave Phuket

 …but first we have to do a little teaching and make a trip to the Big Buddha.

We visited a few schools for the teaching practice required by our certification program. It was a bit of a joke, because we only taught for less than 30 minutes a day to a class of between 6 and 20 kids.  I currently teach about 5 hours a day to classes of at least 50 students, and use almost none of what I was taught in certification.

But never mind! The kids were adorable. We taught for the first three days in a Muslim school on the untouristy side of Phuket.

Roisin giving Thai children a Donegal accent

How cute are they??

  It was a lot of fun, and quite cool for a change because it rained the whole time. The school was small and very old, and surrounded by jungle.

Pouring. 

On the Thursday of that week we went to a sort of juvenile detention center, which I have no photos of because cameras were forbidden. The teens we met there weren’t so much hardened criminals as they were kids driven to minor crimes by desperate circumstances. They had next to no English, and seemed discouraged by our lesson since we had been told to prepare for their age level (older teenagers) rather than their ability. They were just sad high school kids, and even though the place wasn't horribly jail-like, they definitely wanted to go home.The whole visit was pretty distressing. 

On Friday, we went to the Football Youth Home.

 The Football Youth Home was founded and financed by one Henrik Lorenz, a German businessman and long-time footballer who settled in Hong Kong for 40 years and who died in 2006. 

Good guy. 

Anyway, he apparently came to Thailand, presumably saw kids playing soccer and kids in bad situations, and decided to do something.

 Here’s the website, in case anyone wants to visit or volunteer or donate: http://home.exetel.com.au/katjahouse/Thailand_html/index.html

These kids had incredible English from travelling all over the place playing soccer. 

There was also a class of little kids upstairs.

And we got a tour of the building, which had dorm rooms where each boy had his medals and belongings.

...is it creepy that I took a photo of a little boy's bed? It wasn't until I wrote this caption. 

It was a nice place, run by kind people. After we finished teaching the boys presented us with roses made from palm leaves. Cute.

Sometime in the mix of all this, we made a trip to the Big Buddha, which is exactly what it sounds like. Remember we saw it in the wake of the boat in the first post of any substance on this blog?

As promised, it’s big.

...although none of my photos provide any context for how big. Just take my word for it. 

Before you climb up to see it up close, you pass through a sort of hall with informative (I assume, they're in Thai) displays on the building of the Buddha:

requests to donate and to not feed the monkeys:

Happy animals (you'll always find happy animals in sacred places here):

Mai Pen Rai. 

And monks, blessing visitors:

I got blessed, which involved a monk sprinkling me with water, smacking me on the head with a water soaked broom-type thing, and tying a lanyard around my wrist, all the time muttering in Thai.

Climbing up the steps to the Big Buddha, we found that much of it actually wasn’t finished yet.

You can buy a marble tablet, scrawl something personal on it, and they’ll eventually use it in constructing the exterior of the Buddha. Right now the tiles are just piled up, waiting to be cemented on there, but it’s a sweet statement about the universal and internal nature of the Buddha spirit. Or something.

The views were the real attraction, even though it was overcast. Very cool.

Next! We leave Phuket for Krabi, where we take a long-tailed boat ride with a questionable character and climb 1,237 steps to the top of a mountain. Some of us do, anyway.